The present invention relates generally to the field of telecommunications, and more specifically, to the field of wireless telephone interface systems.
It is well known that personal computers, work stations, and mainframe computers may be used to send electronic mail (e-mail) messages (e.g., in the form of ASCII text) to destination electronic mailboxes, often through service providers with access to the Internet, LAN (local area network), or other data network. Voice-mail messaging systems, much like answering machines, are also well known, wherein a telephone caller's spoken message is transmitted to a destination voice-mail mailbox where it is recorded for later playback by a designated recipient having access to the voice-mail mailbox.
In addition to conventional telephones connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), there also exist data network telephones wherein two (or more) users having personal computers (PCs) with microphones, speakers and sound conversion capabilities connect to each other through a data network and exchange electronic voice signals to be heard by the respective users. These telephones are often termed Internet phones or I-phone systems when the data network involved is the Internet, and users often access the Internet through Internet Service Providers (ISPs). One problem with data network telephones is that users must agree to be available to connect to each other simultaneously to hear the voice signals. One additional problem is the limitation of inadequate microprocessor processing power on many PCs in compressing real time voice signals for transmission over bandwidth limited networks such as the Internet.
One conventional solution to these problems is a voice electronic mail (voice e-mail) system which converts user voice signals into data to be transmitted in an e-mail message. Unfortunately, both this system and the data network telephone system require additional hardware that many PCs don't include and are otherwise inconvenient to transport, e.g., sound conversion and microphone capabilities. In addition, the playback of audio sounds on a PC speaker, especially a voice e-mail message, is often socially inappropriate in many quiet or public environments.
There is, therefore, a need in the industry for a system for addressing these and other related and unrelated problems.